the fighting temper; and what in
subtler ways manifests itself as impatience, grimness, earnestness,
severity of character. Earnestness means willingness to live with
energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people
or pain to one's self--it makes little difference; for when the
strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter
whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as
anger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple
is its essence. This is what makes it so invaluable an ally of every
other passion. The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious
pleasure the moment they offer themselves as checks to a cause by which
our higher indignations are elicited. It costs then nothing to drop
friendships, to renounce long-rooted privileges and possessions, to
break with social ties. Rather do we take a stern joy in the
astringency and desolation; and what is called weakness of character
seems in most cases to consist in the inaptitude for these sacrificial
moods, of which one's own inferior self and its pet softnesses must
often be the targets and the victims.[145]

[145] Example: Benjamin Constant was often marveled at as an
extraordinary instance of superior intelligence with inferior
character. He writes (Journal, Paris, 1895, p. 56), "I am tossed and
dragged about by my miserable weakness. Never was anything so
ridiculous as my indecision. Now marriage, now solitude; now Germany,
now France hesitation upon hesitation, and all because at bottom I am
UNABLE TO GIVE UP ANYTHING." He can't "get mad" at any of his
alternatives; and the career of a man beset by such an all-round
amiability is hopeless.

So far I have spoken of temporary alterations produced by shifting
excitements in the same person. But the relatively fixed differences
of character of different persons are explained in a precisely similar
way. In a man with a liability to a special sort of emotion, whole
ranges of inhibition habitually vanish, which in other men remain
effective, and other sorts of inhibition take their place. When a
person has an inborn genius for certain emotions, his life differs
strangely from that of ordinary people, for none of their usual
deterrents check him. Your mere aspirant to a type of character, on
the contrary, only shows, when your natural lover, fighter, or
reformer, with whom the passion is a gift of nature, comes